Prix Balzan 2001 pour la climatologie

Projet de recherche

Research on the Mechanisms Governing the Climate System

Global climate change has become a pressing topic of scientific research. The central problem is explaining the causes of the increase in temperature and the potential effects of this. The study of this problem is extremely complex because of the many factors that can contribute to global warming, whether natural or related to human activity. Thus an analysis of the history of thermal evolution of the surface of the earth is fundamental in distinguishing between changes that are "physiological" and those caused by human activity.

One of the most important methods of inquiry into past climate change is the study of polar ice, which is a natural laboratory preserving a “historic memory” of climate changes. Claude Lorius and his group worked for decades on this issue. They were the first to reconstruct not only the history of the Earth’s climate by analyzing polar ice, but also that of the composition of the atmosphere, derived from the analysis of air bub­bles that were trapped in the ice over hundreds of thousands of years. Research was carried out in particular on ice samples taken in proximity to Lake Vostok in Antarctica. Their re­search allowed them to establish the causal relationships between climate and con­tent of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In the context of this, Claude Lorius initially planned to finance three projects with the second half of the Balzan Prize, but in actual fact was also able to finance a fourth. The four groups of young researchers, each led by a senior researcher, presented their results in March 2008.